My Profile

My name is Steven Foster, a Microsoft CRM MVP, working at Intergen as the CRM Product and Marketing Manager. I have over 17 years of CRM experience delivering a multitude of CRM solutions across a number of countries. I hope you find my blog interesting!
I am also an entrepreneur reselling the HappyOrNot customer satisfaction service.

So how do you create a simple dashboard pulling in multiple data from multiple entities in Excel?

Its simple just combine dynamic excel sheets and create a header sheet like this:

1) First perform an advanced find for the first set of data that you wish to dashboard on i.e. Accounst by Industry and export to excel as a Dynamic Pivot or Worksheet

2) Leave excel open and go back into Microsoft CRM and perform the next query i.e. Opportunities by Industry and export to excel as a Dynamic Pivot or Worksheet

3) Now right click on the open worksheet and select move. Select the original open workbook. This copies the sheet and the query to the original workbook. You now have to different data sets in the one excel workbook.

4) Now you just need to create a new sheet for your dashboard i.e. Dashboard

5) Then create your pivot table charts and locate them on the Dashboard sheet.

6) Save your excel as you Industry Review Dashboard and you now have your simple dashboard that you can open and review, or load to excel services in SharePoint and view in CRM.

Just spotted an interesting bug with a query I was running using Advanced find.

My query was display all opportunities that are open and closing in the next 4 months. The results were returned correctly via the advanced find search, but when I exported the data the SQL definition was incorrect.